Welcome to the Anthropocene: According to researchers, we are in a new era

Soil research in a Canadian lake shows that, according to scientists, we have entered a new era since 1950. The beginning of the period in which changes in the Earth’s climate and environment are mainly caused by human activity. The era is not recognized internationally by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), so until then we are still officially in the Holocene.

Geologist Kim Cohen of Utrecht University is a member of the ICS committee, which includes the Anthropocene Working Group. He will participate in the discussion and vote on whether the Anthropocene may become official.

“People have been talking about the Anthropocene for about 15 years, but now scientists have decided where and when this era begins,” he told Edie NL. “The researchers arrived at Crawford Lake near Toronto in Canada. They extracted a block of mud from the bottom and the annual layers can be clearly identified in it.”

Scientists have found plutonium in the layers, which can be traced back to nuclear testing in the 1950s. This indicates human action. In addition, soot particles from coal-fired power plants and alterations from fertilizers were also found.

Coca Cola Sin

He expects there will be more clarity next year as to what era we are officially in. Until then, the Anthropocene remains unofficial.

“The debate about whether a new epoch should start has been going on for some time,” Naturalis paleontologist Rob van den Berg tells Editie NL. “People talk about the Anthropocene, but it is sometimes said with a wink that the new age should be called Coca-Cola Cene, because cans of cola have been in our soil since a certain time.”

“There are about fifty geological epochs, think of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs became extinct, or the Ice Age, when mammoths lived.”

fossil

A new era is determined on the basis of changes in the fossils in the rocks. Personally, Van den Berg believes that it is too early to define a new period now. “We are now living in the Holocene, which began 11,700,000 years ago. The period leading up to that, the Pleistocene, lasted roughly 2.5 million years in all. So a lot could still happen. In fact, researchers of the future, if everything is fossil Just specify when this period began.